Writing
Leadership
Building companies, leading people, and why the endurance-sport analogy is mostly overstated.
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Leadership
What endurance sport does not teach you
Every founder who has finished a long race wants to tell you it is like building a company. Most of that does not survive contact with either activity.
Leadership
Leading people who do not have to listen
A team captaincy is the first job where the outcome depends on people under no obligation to do what you say. Most of leadership is that job.
Leadership
The order is a dependency, not a plan
Three of the companies I have been part of solve one problem at three layers. The stack has an order. The building did not follow it, and the gap between the two is the useful part.
Leadership
The middle is where it gets decided
The start is exciting and the end is satisfying. Almost everything that determines the outcome happens in a stretch that has neither quality.
Leadership
The co-founder conversation everyone postpones
Four questions, all uncomfortable early and all catastrophic late. The discomfort does not decrease with time. The cost does increase.
Leadership
Naming the thing you are bad at
It is the cheapest credibility available and it is almost never used, because it feels like it costs something.
Leadership
When you are the constraint
It arrives quietly and it is hard to see from the inside, because from the inside it looks like being needed.
Leadership
The hardest judgment is when to stop
Everything about founder culture trains persistence. Almost nothing trains the opposite judgment, which is required just as often.
Leadership
What I got wrong about scale
Three things I believed early that did not hold. All three are common beliefs, which is partly why I held them.
Leadership
Why hiring people better than you is harder than it sounds
Everyone agrees with this and comparatively few do it. The obstacle is not recognizing the principle.
Leadership
Most recurring meetings are a missing decision
A meeting that keeps happening about the same topic is usually not a communication problem. It is an ownership problem.
Leadership
Why write any of this down
Publishing opinions in a regulated industry is a small amount of risk for a specific and worthwhile return.
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